Hallucinations
by Darth Videtur
Summary: Summary: Rey thinks she might just be going crazy. (These are shorter snippets than I usually write, but it's slowly growing a life of its own and a PLOT EEEP, so I thought it might be fun to shake things up. xD Rated: PG/PG-13 for violence, dark themes, scary themes)
1. Chapter 1

" **Hallucinations"**

Summary: Rey thinks she might just be going crazy. (These are shorter snippets than I usually write, but it's slowly growing a life of its own and a PLOT EEEP, so I thought it might be fun to shake things up. xD Rated: PG/PG-13 for violence, dark themes, scary themes)

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 **Prologue:**

Rey knew: People on Jakku go crazy.

She swore it would never be her.

She would never wander through the sand-mists chattering with hallucinations and feeling her soul dry up.

Well… she was right about the soul thing, at least.

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 **Hallucinations: Part 1**

The first time Rey hallucinated, she ended up scaring both herself and her conjured apparition. Prowling high above on the sand dunes overlooking the Graveyard, dehydrated and wishing she had a few drops of water left in her canteen for the ride back home, Rey came face to face with the shrouded figure, shrieked once, and scrambled back to her speeder with heart pounding and fingers sweaty.

For its own part, her hallucination shimmered and dissolved in an instant as though equally frightened.

Rey muttered under her breath the entire trip home, with her precious few findings strapped to the back of the rusty red speeder. She wasn't crazy, she wasn't one of the desert walkers who went out into the sand-mists and wasted away talking to nothingness.

She might be crazy for staying on this Force-forsaken planet, hoping someone would come back for her, but she wasn't crazy like _that._

Not her. Besides, they would come back for her, and she was determined to stay sane until then.

She wouldn't become like the others. Never ever.

That evening she scratched another line on the hull of the broken walker and stared up into the darkening sky. With a good night's sleep, she would be as good as new. Next time, she would be sure to take more water with her.

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 **So, a short start, lol, but that's the snippet format of this story, and it takes place over weeks and months, at least at the beginning. :D**


	2. Chapter 2

**Hallucinations Part 2**

The second time she met her hallucination, three weeks later, Rey fought the surge of fear that it wasn't a hallucination but a ghost. One of those ghosts the elders – the old ones with ragged feet and broken eyes that sparkled with dust – talked about in Niima Outpost around the campfires at night. It was a Graveyard, they said solemnly to make the scraps of children shiver, and not without reason.

They said things _lurked_ out there. Angry things. Old things.

She rarely stayed for the stories, rarely stayed anywhere after dark if she could help it, but the hushed whispers rushed back into her mind the minute she spotted the shrouded figure gliding on the edge of her field of vision.

No, not gliding. _Lurking._

Rey jerked her head up, eyes rolling white, and the hallucination stayed in place. It looked like a short, thin human, all cloaked and faintly transparent like it was made of shimmering dark water. A mirage, Rey thought in relief. After all, it _was_ on the horizon, on the top of the same dune overlooking the Graveyard, looking at her. At least it was keeping its distance this time.

"I'm not superstitious," she muttered. Terrified. After all, she was only a fourteen year old girl (she thought… well, she was pretty sure anyway). Someone could cut her a little slack for taking those stories to heart, especially when she stood alone in such a desolate place where ghosts seemed more likely to exist than the living.

Rey plucked up her courage and waved her hands in front of her face. It stayed there, on the ridge, unmoving, so she gathered her scavenged items, packed them up, and headed home a little early. No use tempting fate.

She wasn't crazy, but she _did_ wonder what her hallucination would do if she tried to talk to it.

Rey barked a dry laugh. As if.

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 **1\. Hallucination or ghost? Hard to say! :D Stay tuned….**


	3. Chapter 3

**Hallucinations Part 3**

The third time they – _they_ , Rey thought? – met, she was digging through the remains of an old Empire TIE fighter half buried in the sand along the edge of the Graveyard.

At least there wasn't a skeleton in this one, which was a step up from the last few small ships she had scrounged through. Her eyes alight and watchful for other more enterprising, beefier scavengers, this time Rey found the figure standing silently along the edge of Carbon Ridge, not far from the Plaintive Hand Plateau in the distance, shimmering dark hood pulled low over its face.

Rey had to admit the tiniest pull of curiosity. Why would she hallucinate a figure here, of all places? Why only here over the Graveyard? She didn't believe in ghosts, so it had to be a figment of her imagination. Maybe the seeping chemicals and fumes released from the pried-open ships in the Graveyard created a drug-like effect. Maybe she had finally been exposed long enough to really be going crazy. She knew the Graveyard had to be full of toxic waste, but it never stopped her and the other scavengers from trying to stay alive.

You picked the lesser of two evils and hoped you lived a little longer.

That was the game on Jakku, winner takes all.

So, she wasn't crazy. Drugged maybe, but not crazy. It was only curiosity that pulled her back to this area.

She looked up again. It stared right at her, featureless.

Rey shuddered and then waved.

It stared.

Well. Fine by her if her own hallucination was too uppity to say hello! Rey determined to ignore it and continue her explorations, and she found more working gears and bits than she had ever found in a TIE before. When she had the clanging parts hooked up to her dragnet, she looked at the ridge again.

It still stood motionless.

Of course. Jakku would have boring hallucinations too. Rey bit her lip and waved boldly up the ridge in mocking farewell at herself, at the world, at the hard and uncaring sun.

And nearly jumped out of her skin when her hallucination waved back.

When she got home, she slid under her thin patched cover and shivered for hours.

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 **1\. Uh oh, her hallucination is interacting with her now…. Rey, either you are going crazy, or something's afoot. xD**

 **2\. "Don't get cocky, kid!" :D**


	4. Chapter 4

**Hallucinations Part 4**

Whether she liked it or not, evidently Rey was destined to be stuck with her hallucination. It showed up every time she went to the Graveyard, which meant… a lot. The Graveyard was a rich source of supplies and no scavenger could afford to avoid it on Jakku, least of all a small slip of a girl who could only fend for herself.

Hoping someday someone might care about her again.

So Rey forced her mind to calm each time it appeared on the ridge. Steadily she worked the vast stretches of sand, pockmarked by the leftover wreckage of the great battle. Whenever she moved down along the length of ridge, it matched her pace and glided along the top of the ridge. Rey never told anyone about it, because if Unkar Plutt found out she really _was_ crazy, he'd dump her like all the others who ended up desolate and slowly wasting away in the far reaches of Jakku. The sane residents of the desert planet had little patience for the crazy ones, even though they would someday be all the same anyway.

As the weeks passed and the scratch marks covered more and more of the walker's hull, Rey found herself looking forward to the presence of her hallucination, just as she feared she might. Loneliness was Jakku's deadliest weapon, and loneliness made even a hallucination a viable option, especially one as consistent as this one. None of the other scavengers ever seemed to notice it, which confirmed that it must be no ghost but truly her own mind turning on her in the absence of stimulation. Rey waved to it every day when she arrived now, and it dutifully waved back.

One solemn lifting of a shadowed hand.

Over time, Rey began to notice something very, very strange. Her subconscious must have been more observant than her conscious mind, because the hallucination would sometimes take the lead, walking along the ridge and stopping to point down at one of the wrecks. Rey would go to it and inevitably find useful items.

Once, after stripping the parts off a _very nice_ preserved turbojet engine from an old Republican hauler, Rey bowed to the figure, feeling more than a little silly and playful and unusually happy. Maybe she was going mad after all.

It nodded back, slow and ponderous, still so desolately featureless despite her best efforts to see, and faded into the dust swirling off the edge of the ancient stones.

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 **1\. Rey's becoming used to her new friend, which might or might not be a good thing….**

 **2\. Coming up: Rey decides to settle matters.**


	5. Chapter 5

**Hallucinations Part 5**

"Well, what do you want to do today?"

Rey had started talking to it.

She hadn't meant to. It just… happened. Wasn't that the way it went for them all?

Well, she was talking to herself really, because it was a hallucination. As long as she remembered that, she could stay sane. It kept its distance ever after the first day she encountered it, always hovering on the ridge now, high overhead and standing guard on her claims. That's what it felt like, some – if not benevolent then at least _benign_ – force watching over her dealings in the slim shadows of the Graveyard.

A sentinel.

Her sentinel.

"What are you looking for, anyway?"

She grinned out into the harsh sun and shielded her face with her hand, peering up at the ridge. The figure always appeared to be gazing out over the vast stretches of the desert planet, though she could never make out eyes or even binoculars. Ever since that first day, she'd never dared to approach it either, but she had come to think of it as her subconscious companion. She didn't trust the other scavengers enough to carry conversations much beyond terse offers of trade or news of deadly sandstorms. Her own mind? Another matter.

"You've been here as long as I have, there's nothing but sand," she grunted into her facial filter as she tugged the old freighter's grating loose. "And that's nothing to look at, either."

The grating dropped down with a sharp clang to reveal the inner parts shredded and burnt. Rey sighed with disappointment. Most of the wiring had snapped or shredded, and several of the casings were fused shut by the heat of the engine's fire. That didn't do them much good, did it?

Rey glanced back up at the distant shadow. "Slim pickings today…" she grunted. "You want to point out another of those haulers? Like that one we found a few weeks back? Help a girl out?"

The figure made no motion, curiously still. For a moment, Rey fought down a surge of worry about what _that_ meant. Maybe she was boring even herself now? She looked in the direction it looked, but from her position down in the valley, it seemed to be looking at nothing in particular.

"Hey," she said softly. "Hey you."

It shimmered and vaporized on a drift of hot wind.

Rey fought a surge of loneliness. "Well, I guess that's that…"

She trudged home.

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 **1\. Rey is gonna realize she needs to do something about this, and soon.**

 **2\. She's either losing it, or the game's afoot!**


End file.
